Nothing But Blackened Teeth(15)

No. Not like honey, I corrected myself. It was sinewy, sweet as a knot of tendon after you’d gnawed on it for minutes, a faintly corrupt delight. “We need to go.”

“After the ceremony,” said Phillip.

“We need to go,” I said again.

“It’ll be fine.”

“Spoken like a true white guy.” Lin rolled a frustrated noise in his throat, entirely animal. Ahead of us, Faiz and Talia joined shy hands in front of an altar to the faded dead, the small gods of whatever still lived in the eaves. You could feel the house pull in a breath. You could feel its eyes. I could. “Ignoring everything that Cat’s said, how does any of this seem like a good idea? Even—even assuming that it’s all just the delusions of an incredibly drunk mind, this is just plain weird. How the fuck does any of this make sense to you people?”

“You know—” Talia sighed.

Lin, always so happy to rephrase everything as a joke, sucked at the air, before the words came out in a shotgun blast. “Fuck you and everything you think you know.”

“You’re welcome to leave. The only person who wanted you here was Cat, and the two of you—” She bit her lip as I stood, teeth a wound of white. Untangling from Faiz, Talia surged forward, red silk worming behind her. “Just. Get out, will you? No one wanted you here. Not you, not your jokes, your stupid goddamned cheese—”

“Hey. You ate as much of my rice as anyone else, thank you very much.”

“Go,” Talia said, one last time with feeling. “Just. Go away.”

“Fine,” I said.

Everyone turned as I spoke. Every eye in the hall including the ones dotting the walls, the ones framed in gold-leaf, drawn in brushstrokes. The room spun, wobbled on the fulcrums of a thousand painted faces.

And the manor breathed out.

“We’re leaving,” I said, and then once more for good measure, softer the second time around. “We’re leaving.”

“Cat, don’t.” Faiz was already cutting in. “You don’t have to go. We don’t have any problem with you. It’s just. Lin, dude. Sorry. No hard feelings. But I’d like this to be a happy thing, you know? Just. Can you take—actually, I don’t know, you know?”

“They can both go, if they want,” said Talia.

“Talia.” Phillip, intervening at last, a clergy’s bright collar buttoned to his cassock, every inch the Hollywood caricature. Neither Talia nor Faiz were Catholic, but the joke had been that it didn’t matter. This whole thing was meant to be non-denominational, nonorthodox. A gift wrapped up in a joke, wrapped up in an experience. “Is this really what you want for your wedding? I don’t think kicking Lin out of—”

Talia tweaked her veil into place: an anachronism, a concession to media indoctrination by the West. It was a scrap of white lace, so gaudy against her borrowed raiments, threaded with something that made it gleam in the light. The tasseled curtain came down with a sigh of silver.

The lights twitched.

“Don’t need your pity,” I said, stiffly. “Don’t want it either.”

“Cat. You’re drunk,” Phillip said, and his kindness had a kind of teeth to it, had subtitles. Sit the hell down, it said. The walls wore a senate of kitsune, pale-furred, the tips of their tails dip-dyed in coal. They waited, uncharacteristically imperious. A delegation of tengu was bringing their prime minister a gift.

“What happened to trying to keep these idiots alive?” said Lin.

“Like he said, I’m drunk.” My laugh was just bones knocking together, without any meat to cushion their clamor. Hateful, hollow. I gritted my teeth against their stares, began limping back towards the door. “I don’t know better. I’m tired.”

“You don’t have to go,” Faiz said again. Like that’d be exactly enough to make it all better, put me back on my leash. He said it with so much sympathy too. Too much, in fact, his expression greasy with it. And I stared at him, I could see where that compassion slopped away to reveal exasperation, irritation, disgust as old as the memory of us first exchanging hellos in school. “Really.”

I ignored him. “Come on, Lin.”

“Cat.” Faiz, still trying. Too little, too late.

I didn’t look back.

Footsteps charted the mathematics of their motions: a drag of fabric as Talia swept around the bell curve of her orbit, Faiz’s plodding shuffle falling a quarter-beat behind. Phillip’s footsteps crisp but hesitant, loud on the wood. Lin was the only one who moved like he wasn’t weighted down by sins, nearly noiseless as he padded along behind me.

Halfway:

“You know what? Fuck it.”

That was all the warning we were given. Lin’s stride became a run, and I turned in time to see him lunging for Talia’s veil. His fingers closed over the pearlescent gauze, the beaded trim. The fabric tore in ripples, like swathes of pale skin, sunlight gleaming through, soft as eyelashes. Lin’s cry of triumph choked to death halfway to its birth.

She hid nothing this time, the thing beneath Talia’s veil. My girl from the mirror. There wasn’t a face to remember because there wasn’t a face to find. Black hair tendriled across contourless meat, no features to be seen. Only suggestions. Only smooth flesh and that grinning mouth, those red lips stretched as far as they’d go, black teeth, and the smell of ink. As I gawked, Talia’s kimono bled itself of color, pinks and golds runneling from every layer, pouring into the dust at her feet so all that was left was white, the color of expensive chalk and bone left to cook in the sun.